The New Monthly Magazine and American English, 1814-1824

Abstract

URING THE DECADE of the War of 1812, British periodicals gave increasing attention to life and manners in the newly formed United States of America. One of the most important English journals providing information and comment about America was publisher Henry Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, which was founded in 1814.1 In its formative years the New Monthly Magazine (which continued publication until 1884) served a British audience whose skepticism about the New World was mixed with a keen interest in life there. Its articles ranged from satiric observations on the folly of emigrating from England to respectful presentations of the presidential addresses of Madison and Monroe. Among the subjects most often discussed in the New Monthly's articles about America during its first decade of publication was the quality and future of the new nation's developing literature and language. It seems obvious that the British magazine's contributors felt free to criticize America's literary achievements or, at the very least, to attribute its meager successes to emulation of British models. American language itself was usually either derided for its strange Americanisms or compared unfavorably to the language used by Shakespeare, Spenser, or Milton. New Monthly's writers, indeed, seemed genuinely concerned lest American English evolve into a separate language, incomprehensible to British readers. Throughout the magazine's volumes, pride in Britain's literary tradition and in the majesty of the mother tongue is evident even in those few articles that envision the future flowering of an American An American correspondent Robertus wrote in 1815, The Americans have a very small walk of literature which can be called their own, but the publishers re-print all English works of note, at a very cheap rate, and they consequently meet with a wide diffusion (3: 328). He finds, however, that there are very frequently, in the most considerable towns, sales of books in all departments of literature. America and England are equal, according to Robertus, only in possessing a myriad of literary and educational charlatans: 'Rapid improvement,' and 'infallible methods' of writing are every where to be purchased at a few dollars in America, as in England, and education has